The current state of our economy is getting everyone to think more creatively. For business owners, this means finding ways to cut costs, and in San Francisco, it’s all about space. Leasing or renting can be expensive, so there’s been a surge of pop-up ventures, like gourmet food trucks and sidewalk sales. The latest is a pop-up bookstore, and it’s a real store: You can go in, look for books, buy them, and take them home. The catch is that it’s only open for the month of October.

Nick Hoff – brother to KALW’s Chris Hoff – partnered with friend Matt Borruso to see if they could pull this off. KALW’s Casey Miner recently paid them a visit to find out.

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CASEY MINER: Matt Borruso and Nick Hoff are standing on opposite sides of a big, empty table in a big, empty art gallery on Valencia Street, piling stacks of books in front of them.

MATT BORRUSO: I just like the absurdity of this. We’re going to collect 400 boxes of books or whatever, then we’re going to build a whole store that should be here for the next 20 years, and then we’re going to take it apart in a month.

Three days from now, this room will be a bookstore. But come November, there won’t be a book in sight.

BORRUSO: If there’s a Cormac McCarthy book it could just go in like a little fiction section.

Borruso’s a visual artist; Hoff’s a translator and writer. Both support themselves in part by collecting and selling books. They often sell at flea markets, and they wanted to try out a storefront. Hoff says the store is more of an event than a business, because it’s only up for a month. But because it’s based around books, it gives people a chance to think about bigger issues – like whether actual bookstores have any role to play in an increasingly digital marketplace.

NICK HOFF: There’s all this talk in the media about the death of the book, the death of the bookstore, e-books rising and everything, the decline of reading in general. We’re also having a bunch of events that focus on different issues around print culture. This is a way to focus people’s attention…

And this particular bookstore is as much an art project as a literary one.

HOFF: We thought if we had a physical space, we could really develop a display and certain types of categories that we feel aren’t really represented in your average bookstore.

Which is to say, you won’t find 600 cookbooks here, or John Grisham’s entire life’s work.

BORRUSO: We have great freedom to just do whatever we want. If we want to have a huge section on eyes we can have that even if nobody wants it.

Borruso says that’s because even though this bookstore does sell books, profit is not its main goal. Which brings us to its name: Scanners. It’s a play on a term booksellers use to describe people in the industry who only value profit – to the point where they visit bookshops armed with mobile bar code readers. So part of this store’s goal is to spark discussion about the value of books in a scanner culture. But Borruso and Hoff also want to give people the chance to do the other kind of scanning, the kind you do when you’re just letting your eyes roam over a random shelf. And to suggest maybe that’s a valuable activity in itself.

BORRUSO: The used bookstore is no longer a viable economic model. And so we’ve done this as an idea of what we might like a bookstore to be.

A few days later, that idea is open for business. Every shelf is packed with books; hundreds more sit on the tables, and still more are mounted on the walls, covers facing outwards. Alyson Sinclair, who works at City Lights bookstore in North Beach, says she’s impressed with the display.

ALYSON SINCLAIR: They could be framed pieces in a gallery; very visual books about, like, space; some don’t even have titles, they’re just colors.

A little after 6pm, about 30 people are browsing. Many of them are here for Scanners’ first public event, a conversation about architecture … books about architecture. But a few people, like Jay Moses, stumbled on the store by chance.

JAY MOSES: Evidently they’re only open for a month here. But the theme is books, obviously, and eclectic books at that. Nothing appears to be pedestrian but there’s a certain randomness.

An example: On one wall, there’s a tome called Artist and Computer, next to an old FBI bulletin, next to a book titled Foreign Beer Cans.

MOSES: I can’t put my finger on exactly what commonality there is to all these books except that they seem to be mostly rectangular.

The lack of traditional structure doesn’t seem to matter to the patrons. They’re all happily browsing.

HELEN GILBERT: There’s actually a book right behind you that I’ve been trying to make my way to called Making Plastic Pipe Furniture.

NOTARA LUM: Patchwork Quilt Art in a little paperback, that was pretty cool.

JAY MOSES: There’s a book here on kitsch. I opened it up: Hitler’s tea service. A book dedicated to bad taste. Here it is.

KIM RANDOLPH: I bought a copy, very inexpensive, just a little paperback, a copy of The Illustrated Man by Ray Bradbury. I haven’t read that book for years.

The delight shared by Helen Gilbert, Notara Lum, Jay Moses, and Kim Randolph is exactly what co-curator Matt Borruso was hoping would happen.

BORRUSO: It’s the idea that you’re going to find something really good in here that you didn’t know you were going to find.

His partner, Nick Hoff, is philosophical about the enterprise.

HOFF: If you want to make a sustainable business model, this is not it. But this is a bookstore. It’s a possibility.

A possibility of discovery. A possibility of community. A possibility of remembering what it’s like to lose yourself in world you never knew existed – and a possibility that other people might value that experience too. A possibility – for the next three weeks, anyway.

In between the FBI bulletin and Foreign Beer Cans, I’m Casey Miner for Crosscurrents.

Scanners is open at the Mina Dresden Gallery at 312 Valencia Street through the end of October. Their next event is tomorrow night, Wednesday, October 12, at 6:30pm – it’s a talk about hoarding in the digital age.

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